Glens Falls Chronicle Serving the Glens Falls/Lake George region; Warren, Washington and northern Saratoga counties since 1980
By Cathy DeDe, Chronicle Managing Editor
Andrew Kopf, 32, is betting big on John Street. He calls it “the South Street of Hudson Falls.”
John Street has “many reputations,” he says. “It has fallen, and it will come again, just like Hudson Falls Village will.
“It only makes sense as Glens Falls develops, the neighboring communities are going to develop. They just will. Hudson Falls is still a cheaper place to live than Glens Falls. There’s no reason it shouldn’t be as nice.”
Mr. Kopf and his wife Ashley have bought 49 and 55 John Street and two more contiguous properties around the corner on Mosher Hill Street.
At 49 John Street, across a parking lot the Kopfs own, they’ve renovated the former bar Whiskey Dick’s for young esthetician Abby Christopher’s “Becoming/The Salon.” The interior is slick; the exterior, while cleaned up, still bears the mark of rougher days.
“People laughed when I bought Whiskey Dick’s…and it was kind of funny,” Mr. Kopf says. “I bought the thing for $70,000. It was completely vacant, the downstairs was….” He stops, at a loss for words to describe.
Altogether the Kopfs have accrued just under an acre. Longer term, Mr. Kopf aims to build a mixed-use apartment building. “Wouldn’t that be great here?”
Mr. Kopf, a 2010 Saratoga High grad, says he was driven north like many others, due to rising costs in his hometown.
He said he was a music teacher at Fort Edward when, about five years ago, he and Ashley took to “house hacking…to supplement our income.”
He said they’d buy a duplex, live in one side while renovating the other to rent, then do the same with another property.
He says he came up with a plan, while still deployed “to fill that hole in the market.” Thus came KPM, his property management business.
All told, the Kopfs own 12 rental units over several properties, he says, and KPM manages about 160 total units for others.
Most are in Glens Falls, but Mr. Kopf reached out to The Chronicle particularly to share his vision for John Street.
Sitting in the KPM storefront window last Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Kopf noted the continuous traffic coming from the Hudson River bridge that connects Hudson Falls with the Fenimore section of the Town of Moreau.
“John Street is the main corridor for anybody coming from South Glens Falls into anywhere in Washington County,” says Mr. Kopf.
A block east of his properties is Main Street, U.S. Route 4. On the corner is I Love NY Pizza. A new car wash is planned on the vacant lot on his side of the street.
“Someone did a car count, and they think it’s worth it (for a car wash),” Mr. Kopf says. “Why shouldn’t this corner pop off?”
Mr. Kopf says of the properties they’ve bought in Hudson Falls, “I just snuck in with good, savvy deals and a little bit of private funding to buy 49 John Street. The rest was with Arrow Bank. They’ve actually been really helpful.”
“As a business owner, I am not waiting for (government) to tell me how to fix the community. We’re getting out there with hammers. We’re doing it. We’re doing good work for good people.”
Mr. Kopf contends some landlords, “they’re charging too much. They’re holding out for the right retail tenant. They want to get our communities kick started, but they are playing by pre-COVID rules.
“You can’t rent for top dollar a storefront in Hudson Falls when the storefronts to the left and right are also empty. It’s a critical mass kind of thing.”
He says, keep commercial rents low.
“There are plenty of people that want to start businesses. I want bodies in storefronts” — anything except a smoke shop, he says. “That’s my vision. Pack these storefronts, take the hit for four or five years, and then we’ll have a vibrant community, and all of a sudden we’ve rebuilt this town.
“In the meantime, we’re in a housing crisis. So the second and third floors of all these things are apartments. We make money hand over fist. The residential side pays for the storefront.”
“We like to provide a good, clean apartment to live in that’s reasonably maintained,” what he deems “a superior product for market rate or less. For that reason, our tenants are very grateful to live with us. We have a very easy time renting. We have good retention. Out of 160 units, I’m rarely renting more than four at a time.”
Mr. Kopf said they’re guided by U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Fair Housing rates. “We just like to give a fair shake,” he says. “HUD Fair Housing rate for a two bedroom is $1,350, for a one bedroom $1,100. Do you even need more than that?”
He said as many as 30% of their tenants “have some kind of assistance, whether it be through the WAIT house or the Glens Falls Housing Authority, the Washington County Housing Authority, veterans and other services…We’re on just about every short list for every organization around here that does housing.”
“Tenants don’t need to be buried by their rent. That’s not the point of doing this. They’re the customers. No investor or property manager makes any money until a tenant pays rent. They don’t pay rent until they have a good, healthy home life. I like our properties to be the setting, not the drama of our tenant stories. Far too often, I think the drama in people’s life is their housing,” whether from unfairly raised rents, he says, “egregious” unmet repairs, even rules against pets. “Good people have pets,” he remarks.
Mr. Kopf is now a licensed real estate broker and also what he calls a “YouTube certified” handyman, watching online tutorials on renovation and maintenance.
“There wasn’t any money to hire anybody, but the Internet’s free,” he laughs.
On the other end of the business, he said he helps owners “by building a strategic plan for how to grow their portfolio.”
“A healthy real estate portfolio lets you treat your tenants right,” Mr. Kopf says.
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